Fireflies in the Garden
by The Carnivorous Muffin
Summary: Makise Kurisu has never really understood Okabe Rinatrou, she tries, but she has never quite managed to divine the meaning of Steins;Gate.


The first time she saw him it was as if she knew that it was not the first time they had met. There was such an overwhelming sense of déjâ vu, a crippling sense of expectation, even before he had said a single word. She had looked even at that worn ridiculous lab coat and known, somehow known, what his face would look like beyond that.

Looking at him she had seen the face of her own destiny, of herself spread over infinite dimensions, until she could no longer recognize herself as Makise Kurisu but rather something else entirely.

Later this moment was overwritten in that storage closet, the smell of his blood as she came to, neither the man nor her father present and her theories gone. She remembered waking, standing carefully and walking with slow agonizing steps out of the closet, wondering if she needed to call the police since he had been… but he was gone now, like he had never been there in the first place, or worse had never existed in the first place. That thought of non-existence had not just been jarring, for the sake of her sanity, but it had also been painful and raw.

For weeks the thought of him obsessed her, constantly she would think back to him, to her father's lecture sitting in her hotel room in pajamas feeling very much her age if not younger. She wondered if she should seek him out, she was fairly certain she could remember his name, Okabe Rintarou or perhaps it was Hoiin Kiyoma, it had been unclear but either she could find. But if she did what would she find, she had this terrible overwhelming fear that she would only seek him out to find that the knife had killed him, or that it had brought him out of existence somehow, because he must exist that much was certain he had to have some basis in reality.

In the end she would find him by pure chance in a main street in Akihabara. He looked at her, almost shocked by her presence as she was by his, and wordlessly pressed a pin into her hand before saying, "I dub thee, Makise Kurisu, lab member 004 of Future Gadgets Laboratory."

* * *

Future Gadgets Laboratory was at once familiar and strange to the point where she could barely process it. It was certainly nothing like any lab she had ever worked in or heard about, she was stretching even to call it a lab. It was a worn apartment, obviously lived in by two slobs, that had half-finished mostly useless projects strewn about the room having overflowed from the back storage closet. These projects had a naming scheme so bizarre that there didn't seem to actually be any order to it, at one point she asked Okabe and he had responded with a strange smile, as if he had been expecting the question and said that they were all given very official sounding names but that there was no real system to it. Gadget Number 005 Version 3.6 might very well be created before a Gadget Number 005 Version 2.3, if there were multiple versions of the gadget at all.

There was no real sense of purpose there, of trying to create a magnum opus, projects were very regularly started and then discarded without any real order. There was no goal to be met, nothing to be discovered, it felt at once like a hobby or a club to her.

It was like nowhere she had ever worked before and perhaps that was why she couldn't bring herself to stay away. She'd only planned to visit once or twice, to catch a glimpse of the man in the white lab coat again, but somehow once or twice had become most of her time. Soon research at the university became more of a chore than the Future Gadgets Lab, she would look anxiously at the clock until she could leave and visit once again that down town apartment.

Here she was, a published physicist inventing toys if anything at all with a self-proclaimed mad scientist, his best friend, and his pet hacker.

Sometimes she wondered how it was that she got there at all. She had the feeling as if she belonged there, had always belonged there, and that she had just failed to visit before then. She wanted to know how he had looked at her and known in that instant, without a word, and given her a pin. There had been such familiarity in his eyes, relief when he looked at her, nostalgia, and an unbound joy at just seeing her.

She later learned that she had not been the first person after Mayuri and Daru to receive a pin. She later heard from a somewhat perplexed Mayuri that there were eight pins floating about, she had been given the seventh, and yet she was the fourth lab member. According to Mayuri they had known the other lab members much longer, they had known Ruko and Fenris for years, she wasn't even sure he had known her name when they first met. Even more strange was Mayuri's quoting of him, saying that the eighth lab member didn't exist yet.

Still it was only sometimes that she thought about things like that.

* * *

He answered her immediately after she asked. She wasn't sure what she expected, some evasion, perhaps a mad declaration from his alter ego Hoiin Kiyoma but instead he appeared strangely sober. For a moment he had looked old, ancient even, his eyes had paled as if seeing beyond her and through the folds of space and time itself.

"The thesis you presented your father was on time travel, a time machine, correct?" He asked her, although she got the feeling that it wasn't quite a question.

They were sitting in a park, alone, in the cool dark beneath a glowing streetlamp. As soon as she had asked he had motioned them outside saying that this was a story best told walking and that the memories in the lab sometimes distracted him from the telling, or so he said.

They hadn't talked about her father's lecture, or the events that happened there, since that day. She had never asked where he had gone, why he had allowed himself to be stabbed in her place, why he had let her father go with her work, why he had left her behind, or anything in that regards. She had wanted to, that was the first reason she had even come to the lab, to ask him why he had done anything but somehow she couldn't bring herself to do it. Looking at his face, cast a pale and yellow hue beneath the lamp, she couldn't bring herself to ask how he knew what her papers had been on either.

"Yes." She said instead quietly.

"Do you believe time travel is possible, then?" He pressed further, it was bizarre seeing him so serious, he always put on a façade. To see him stripped of it now only made her more wary of whatever his answer might be.

"I wrote it, didn't I?" She snapped back at him.

A quirk of a smile at that, again not surprised by anything she did, before it disappeared once again.

"Time travel isn't really time travel, per se." He began slowly watching her face, "One can travel back in time but it isn't always that linear. Most of the time time travel is accompanied by a shift in world lines."

"World lines?" She asked, she supposed he was talking about parallel universes but it seemed like at the same time he wasn't, as if that word choice was very deliberate.

"Someone named John Titor proposed that each reality is composed of a single thread, a world line, and that when any event takes place where multiple outcomes are possible the thread diverges into separate parallel world lines. Titor stated that there were infinite world lines for each possibility that occurs in reality. Time travel, then, didn't alter the past so much as shift that reality into a different world line where the changed event did occur."

She wanted to interrupt and ask if this was another one of his crazy schemes because while she had proposed time travel and time machines she had not proposed an infinite number of parallel dimensions. However she again caught sight of his face and that strange haunted expression that he tried to hide every once in a while, this was Okabe Rintarou made raw, every pretense stripped until the bare bones of him was revealed.

Here he paused, having given all relevant information, perhaps preparing himself to divulge more personal information. "I am not from this world line originally." Is what he said, "In fact I have travelled through many world lines to reach here, not just one."

He looked away from her out into the dark past, "We made a time machine not one that could send people back but rather information, such as text messages. At first it seemed fine but things are more complicated than that. For one thing I was the only one who could remember the changes, I believe everyone has at least some ability to read Steiner but it doesn't seem to be as developed as my own. For another what seem like small divergences turn out to be quite large even if they seem harmless enough at first."

He trailed off with the final strangely ominous words, "It took me many tries to reach Stein's Gate."

* * *

He considered that vague explanation necessary, or so she figured later. And perhaps it was necessary, because there were times when he was simply uncannily perceptive. He knew her, he knew her far too well, he knew things she had never told him or anyone for that matter. He seemed to forget what she had told him in pasts that no longer existed and what she had told him in this one.

Or at least that's what he said.

In truth most of the time she didn't really believe that time-travel nonsense, sure she had written a thesis on it, ready to present to her father but that didn't mean she was willing to accept that Okabe Rintarou, a man who wore the same lab coat day after day and proclaimed to not be a scientist but a _mad_ scientist, turned his microwave oven into a time machine. She would have completely written it off as one of his jokes if he had only been more insistent. He called her Christina, which he knew she hated, on a daily basis but he rarely brought up his time travel experiences. Aside from the brief explanation of why he sometimes referenced things that never happened or acted a little weird he never talked about it, did not even deign to mention it.

There were instances, places, moments, where he would stop and pause with a haunted and almost lost expression. Even so after he shook himself he wouldn't mention what it was about, even when pressed, but rather would distract and deflect.

Okabe was a masterful deflector. He had created an entire alter ego whose sole purpose was to distract and confound, Hoiin Kiyoma, the mad scientist not even willing to specialize in physics but rather the mad _scientist_. He did it so well that no one even realized they had been directed away from a conversation, rather they always left thinking _he_ was the one who was crazy.

So there were days when she believed him and days when she didn't. Most of the time she didn't think about it and focused instead on her new role as the mad scientist's assistant and apprentice, Christina, even if she wouldn't actually answer to that name.

* * *

She did not return to America. After returning initially, when that first year after the summer of her father's lecture had passed, she had known that she would stay with Future Gadget's Laboratory. She would pursue her doctorate in Japan and spend all her free time in the lab.

She had never intended to stay in Akihabara, at least not in the beginning. Something had changed though, she found she could no longer contemplate a life without Future Gadgets Laboratory. That if she had to give up academia completely, become only Hoiin Kiyoma's assistant, she would.

Physics was still her life's blood, her passion, but academia was not. She had seen what academia had bought her father at the end of the day.

So she came back, she got her P.H.D. and she moved into the lab even though it was disgusting, filled with men and their toys, and way too small for four people to live in. It didn't matter because that was where she belonged.

And Okabe Rintarou remained Okabe, that mysterious time-travelling prophet who was only half-believed by his audience, and sometimes that infuriated her but at the same time…

There were instances when time travel came to the surface, moments where he would panic blindly, whenever Mayuri looked at her grandmother's silver watch whenever he happened to catch sight of the lab's clock at a certain angle. His eyes would grow wild, his face pale, and his muscles would tense as if about to spring into action.

He hated the movie The Terminator, not because of the robots, but because of the time travel and the future portrayed. He hated most films and books associated with time travel although he did say to her at one point that he identified greatly with Slaughterhouse Five, I have been kidnapped by Trafalmadorians too many times to bother counting.

He read the latest research on time travel religiously as well as research papers on a myriad of other topics including black holes, it was always with an intensity that was not quite given to his other work, as if this was not mad science at all but something more holy and altogether more deadly.

Once, after reading through a paper late at night when she had been near the verge of sleep at the table, he had walked over to Daru softly who was on the computer and had said in a very serious tone that they were going to have to sabotage To-Oh's physics department. A few weeks later their equipment had malfunctioned and their data had been erased and the progress they had made towards time travel had been lost to the abyss.

"My paper, the one I was going to give my father, it was destroyed too." She said to Okabe soon after that particular incident. "Did you mean for that to happen?"

To his credit he did nod quite promptly, no skirting around the issue there, her work had been discarded and sabotaged with all the rest, "You were closer than anyone else, you actually got it, but you have to understand Kurisu that Steins Gate cannot hold under that much pressure."

She didn't know how she felt about that, she liked him, she really liked him, sometimes looking at him she thought it was love but she didn't understand him. How can you be a scientist when you hide knowledge, when you sabotage it, when he would go so far even against her? He didn't try to explain himself, he never did, he would just look at her with eyes that said it was better if she just didn't know.

So she didn't know and she hated it sometimes.

* * *

When the married, when he smiled at her across the alter, he did not say "I love you" though he had said that before instead he said, "This is the will of Steins Gate."

Her husband, how odd to think of him like that, had the weirdest religion she had ever heard of. Long before their marriage she had asked him to explain, "Just what is this Steins Gate, Okabe?"

Drunk on the roof of the lab with cheap sake and more gumption than usual they had both been flushed, her more than him, and she had cheerily waved the bottle around in place of hand gestures. With as much thought as a drunken man could muster he had attempted to respond with his own sloppy hand gestures wildly moving about as usual, so much dramatics this man had, he should have been an actor not a faux physicist.

"Steins Gate is…" He trailed off his hands flailing about for him, "It's the universe, a portion of the universe, like God but not it's more there. Not paradise, but the best of worlds, attainable worlds, a sentient being that looks and… like fate, but a place, but not a place, like a god, but less… Steins Gate is."

He had a myriad of terms like that Steins Gate being the most vague and she supposed closest to the concept of God that she understood, but there was also Reading Steiner (which was never to be confused with the Gate itself), world lines, divergence factors, and various other things. She called it religion but he used them in the way she referred to quantum mechanics or relativity, as if they were written into the very fabric of the universe and simply no one had recognized it yet.

Sometimes, just because of that, she felt like she had secretly married the next Stephen Hawking and that nobody knew it.

"Publish, Okabe, Einstein was a patent clerk and he published you don't have to be at a university. Publish about the world lines, Reading Steiner, all of it."

He didn't though, he'd always say maybe, but then he never would. Publishing terrified him, the idea of that knowledge, even a glimpse of it eeking out into the world terrified him.

Rubbing his face in his hands at the table, after she had asked yet again, he had given a small tired laugh and looked almost dead when he said, "If I were to do such a thing then it would be me, far more than Oppenheimer, who would have reason to say I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds."

He fully believed that knowledge of time travel would destroy society and possibly humanity with it. Worse, there were times in bed when he'd whisper into her hair on the cusp of sleep that he thought it might be inevitable, that we were all so close just on the verge that it would happen and Steins Gate, at least the one he had managed to find would crumble.

"It's so easy, Kurisu, it's so terribly easy…"

Time travel was far more dangerous and deadly than any atomic bomb that had ever been created and far more tempting and subtle for it.

That was her husband, the time-travelling mad scientist prophet.

* * *

There was a second time he time travelled, it was later in their marriage, they had a daughter and sent her to school each hoping that their own brand of science mad or physics would pass down into her. He was a good father, his dramatics making him popular with all the children though the parents were never quite sure what he did.

"So your mother is a professor and your father is…" They always trailed off because Okabe and even she had never failed to reply, "Mad Scientist" to that particular question. The school teacher had become rather alarmed even, when little Hikari Rintarou had written on a class assignment, that her father was a mad scientist who planned to take over the world and spread chaos.

Hikari was very early in elementary school when it happened, or when she supposed it happened, there were only vague memories of it. Everything seemed blurred, for a few weeks, she remembered seeing an girl who looked a bit like an older version of Daru's daughter Suzuha; she remembered her husband pale and anxious, and then she wasn't sure but it seemed to fade and he returned to normal pale and sweating and looking horrified yet somehow believed.

She'd asked him, when he seemed relatively back to normal, and he'd said in a soft quiet voice, "One does not turn down warnings or aid from the part-time warrior Suzuha, I'm afraid I went time-traveling again, more than I ever intended for one life time."

He didn't say why or what he had to do in the past or what Suzuha from the future had even told him, just that it was finished and done and that they were fine, for now that was.

For now, throughout their marriage, their work, their lives those words echoed in her head. Steins Gate is the instant, he told her, it is only a still and frozen frame it is mutable and shifts from one world line to the next so that you must always chase it. It never promised eternity.

So for now she lived in Steins Gate, even if he sometimes wandered from it as prophets were prone to doing, and she tried but failed to understand and hoped that for now lasted long past her and her daughter's life time.

It would be easier if Okabe did believe in God and if Steins Gate was as all powerful as he sometimes stated it was when in the mood for dramatics.

It would be easier but it would not be true and physics if it was anything at all was the pursuit of the truth of the universe.

**Author's Note: Because Steins;Gate is amazing and Okabe really is the time travelling mad prophet. Thanks for reading reviews are much appreciated.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Steins;Gate**


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